Bug with the Action One-Upmanship:
Using this action, you are effectively wagering your storytelling abilities against those of another student. If you win, they lose a point of storytelling and gain 2 steps in a random subskill. If they win, then you lose the point in storytelling and they gain the two random subskill steps.
The issue is that while the fluctuations in Storytelling skill is reported in the journal, the random subskill changes are not reported leading to confusion over what you (or they) actually improved.
Edit: Hmmm. Sometimes I see the skill increase and sometimes not. Is it possible to get partial success on this one? To succeed without increasing a random subskill?

I'm pretty happy with things as they are.
My one criticism is that it is pretty expensive (point-wise) to get into the familiar-related stuff. In general this goes back to the ever present question of why train your familiar when you could train yourself? Admittedly there are some good answers to that question, but they are a lot less compelling at the start of the year.

Regardless of the difficulty color coding, I always assumed it was a sorted list from most successful to least successful. This lead to me picking purple over red, even though I also have the same MMO impulses. Presenting them in this order is helpful.

Are there actual Rimbal matches as well that use this system? I thought I saw some spells/abilities in a playthrough that might have been tied to it. If so, does anybody know how to get started in there? (My guess would be adventure, but it is hard to tell)

Am I strange in that I have never gotten into a duel before? (nor have I seen any options for starting one)
It sounds like a really intriguing "mini-game" and one of the best reasons to learn a lot of the magic. Does anybody know how to get involved in this area of gameplay?

Right now, I think it makes a lot of sense to have as large a pool of random events as possible (to prevent repetition and event staleness), but my hope is that as content is added it will make more and more sense to put conditional pre-requisites on them to ensure that they happen in a more sane way.
Actually if/when we get our hands on mod tools, this is the first thing I want to look at. Auditing all the events and establishing prereqs sounds pretty time intensive and something that could be delegated to the community pretty easily.

Here's another entry for the silent skill increase/decrease:
One-upmanship (such a cool ability!) properly mentions the decrease to Storytelling experienced by the participants, but doesn't mention the regain (although it does seem to be occurring) nor the random skill that is increased.

Just wanted to keep this discussion going....
The modding community has the potential to be a "force multiplier" for Black Chicken. There are a lot more modders than there are of you and they work for free. In the ideal case, you can actually pick and choose mod content to fold into the actual product where appropriate. Fixing content bugs or attempting major content tweaks are definitely within the realm of possibility.
Here are a few of the immediate mod ideas that come to mind:
- Typo correction
- Disable/remove adventures/events that depend on bugged features, skills, locations, or other problems
- Establish some new pre-requisites for some of the random events
The pre-requisites in particular may not be desirable in your vision of the game, but having a mod available allows you to evaluate the changes without committing resources to it. Chances are that somebody will find it useful in tuning their own experience, even if in the end it doesn't become a part of the product.

I started a new game after patching and the behavior on success chance (at least with respect to the coloring) seems to be a lot better. If I have only a few points in a skill, it actually looks like it is making more of a difference. Previously it felt like you really had to pour tons of work into a skill to get any benefit out of it at all.
Not sure to what to attribute the difference, but it definitely feels better.

I'll volunteer for to address the "is it worth it".
The game ate my weekend, and yet I feel like I have only pierced the surface of it. I haven't actually gotten a game past mid-terms yet because I keep starting over to try new things. Even after close to 10 characters, on each playthrough I find new skills that I didn't even know the EXISTENCE of. There are 80 student NPCs and I've only really gotten to know a few of them (many/all of them seem to have an adventure story specific to just them).
In the manual credits you can see that they hired literally dozens of writers and it really shows. Between the adventures and the random events, there is probably at least an entire novel's worth of text. You also have character bios, location information, and boatloads of random lore that doesn't serve any specific game function beyond filling out the world and maybe clue-ing you in to ideas for things that you hadn't thought of before.
The $25 price point feels steep for an independent game, but I think the value is here. Content and writers aren't cheap, and a higher price point helps ensure that we will get the chance to play through the second year and beyond. I'm excited to see what they are going to do with the DLC and am eager to get new patches to fix some of the more painful/rough spots in the game as it is now.
It's a rare game indeed that has me crazily pining for the sequel before even finishing the first. I hope when the mod tools come out, modders can both help fill the gap as well as potentially help fix content bugs.

Is there any visual indication (in the calendar log or something) of the skill you gain or the skill the instructor is testing on? I have never seen an increase after a detention session, and I have been unable to guess the skill needed by looking at the instructor's profile. I'm concerned because I still haven't ever been able to escape from detention before.